New book co-authored by Professor Gail Day analyses the work of photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula
Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula by Gail Day and Steve Edwards was published in November.
The book is an acute, overarching analysis of the work of Allan Sekula (1951–2013). Photographer, filmmaker, theorist and one of the most significant media intellectuals of the last fifty years, Sekula is renowned for a sequence of compelling anti-capitalist artworks.
Published by Verso, Amphibious Realities illuminates Sekula’s careful crafting of images and prose.
Gail Day and Steve Edwards outside Derby’s Old Silk Mill in 1998. Photo: Allan Sekula.
Gail Day is Professor of Art History and Critical Theory in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her 2010 book Dialectical Passions: Negation and Art Theory (Columbia University Press) was shortlisted for the Isaac & Tamara Deutscher Prize.
Co-authored with Professor Steve Edwards (Courtauld Institute of Art), Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula is the culmination of the authors’ collaborative reflections on Sekula’s critical documentary photography.
Their engagement dates to their time teaching the Critical History and Theory of Photography at the University of Derby in the 1990s, and where they hosted Sekula on his visits to the UK to promote his epic project Fish Story.
Allan Sekula, ‘Freeway to China 3. Mason Davis and a co-worker loading welding-gas cannisters aboard the Teal’, from the project Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) (1998-99), photograph, 75 x 102.3 cm framed. Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio.
Day and Edwards have written together as well as independently, but this substantial book takes their dialogue to a whole new level.
Posing new questions about the relations between aesthetics and politics, Gail Day and Steve Edwards consider Sekula’s examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of labour and terraqueous capitalism. The book provides a penetrating study which pursues surprising paths through Sekula’s practice, delineating the topics depicted by his photographs as well as his dialectics of form.
Amphibious Realities has been shortlisted for the Library Journal Prize for Best Books of 2025.
Book cover, showing ‘Chief mate checking temperatures of refrigerated containers. Mid Atlantic’. From Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1995).
Professor Gail Day said:
“Steve and I are thrilled to have realised this ambitious project on such an extraordinary artist. The generosity of the Allan Sekula Studio has enabled our book to be richly illustrated.
“We hope to amplify Sekula’s cultural logics, historical perspective and his poetics of prose; to trace the fluidity – and amphibiousness – of his creative thinking; and to weave his critical realism with his critical irrealism.”
Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula by Gail Day and Steve Edwards is available from the publisher’s website as a paperback and e-book.
More information
Find out more about Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula at a 'Marxism in Culture' seminar with Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Alex Fletcher and Stephanie Schwartz on Friday 30 January (17:30 – 19:30) at Institute of Advanced Studies UCL, London.
Feature image
Allan Sekula, 35mm transparency of ‘astronaut’ protestor, from 14-minute looped slide sequence Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black] (1999-2000). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio.
